Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

of flight, claws useless, beak snapped shut and eyes sightless. Gluck’s identification was with the fact of death – the end of all performance.

She cared for creatures. There were two huge bird tables in the gardens with hoppers and trays. She ordered twenty-eight pounds of bird seed and seven pounds of peanuts at a time. Each day in winter the baker brought a large brown loaf which was cut up into tiny squares for the birds. When the frog population became scarce, Gluck had three heated pools dug in the garden for breeding them. Mr Lovett then had to cut the grass with a handmower for fear of hurting them. They spread all round Steyning.

Gluck hoped that she would find in death the peacefulness that eluded her in life. She painted a series of tiny pictures, about thirteen by eighteen centimetres, and called them her ‘Intimations’, taken from Wordsworth’s poem Intimations of Immortality. ‘Cold Grey Stones’ was of the tide coming in on the deserted beach at Worthing. ‘Homeward’ was a lone bird flying into the sunset. The sky, which figured so romantically in her early landscapes, becomes in her late paintings a cool haven. In ‘Transience’ a blackbird alights on a tiled roof, sings, and stays poised for flight, unconcerned by any domestic upsets beneath the eaves. Gluck felt dazzled by the sky when painting this. All her care for detail went into the lichens on the roof and the colours of the slates. Compared to the ornate portrayal of human justice in her portrait of Sir Cyril Salmon, it is a simple, calm piece.

Around her, life faded. Craig went totally blind. Each birthday Gluck sent her a parcel – a bed jacket, or a shawl, or Blue Grass perfume. Tybalt got cat flu, became limp and listless, died in October 1965 and was buried with great grief under the silver birch tree in the garden. Gluck and Edith endured the incapacities of age. Doctors were summoned at all hours – for shingles, heart pains, breathlessness and dizzy turns. Without her work Gluck suffered from frustration and despair:

I swerve between optimism and the deepest depression very easily. I do try to keep my eye on the ball – which is to get back to work, to my vision. But vision comes from a basic certainty and I am still far too easily wobbled.16

Dialogue Crepusculaire, 1961

‘Intimations’: Transience, 1964.

She needed from her work another triumph, another affirmation. Mercifully she found within herself another burst of creative energy. It earned her one last show and final accolade.

NINETEEN

A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW

Gluck’s perfect, hand-made paints were a challenge to her. She had to show her worth again. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how marvellous it is to have such paints …’ she wrote to Nesta (5 February 1970). ‘Oh how I wish you could see them and share the thrill of genuine lapis lazuli and the feel of the paint on the brush.’ In the late sixties she began to work with them, admitting to extraordinary nerves and depression at the task ahead. When, early in 1969, her friend the painter and art historian Martin Battersby spent an afternoon with her looking at her work from the thirties, she panicked at the contrast between her productivity then compared to the fallow years.

One of the first pictures of her renewed vigour, done in 1967, would have made Queen Mary drop her lorgnette. Called ‘The Piper of the Merry Maidens’, it was of a phallic standing stone near Lamorna. According to Cornish legend, The Maidens, a circle of stones near Lamorna, come alive toward midnight and sing strange songs about the sea. That summer, when staying down in the Dolphin Cottage, Gluck again painted the views she loved of Boleigh Farm and St Buryan at dawn; the same strip of land, huddled dwellings and wide sky, but more tentative than her early work and adding little.

For months she painted a jug of pansies on a marble slab. ‘Feel so happy and contented,’ she noted in a rare expression of joy. ‘This group of pansies never existed except in my inner vision and was built up by unheard harmonies.’1 Mr Lovett picked fresh pansies each day from the garden. In January 1967 she finished and signed it and made one of her by then infrequent visits for dinner at Gatewick. ‘All out of tins and fizzy Portuguese rosé!!!’

Time was not on her side. Her hands were swollen with arthritis, she needed a hearing aid, she suffered attacks of vertigo, arthritis, asthma and bronchitis, insomnia and exhaustion. ‘Feel very tired and depressed about future and my failing strength’ was a typical diary jotting from 1968 on. She had a series of bad falls: in the attic at 2 a.m one morning when she hurt her ribs, in Cornwall when she hurt her knee, in her studio when she bruised her nose and sprained her wrist, on the studio path one snowy January day. In the early seventies a housekeeper, Winifred Vye, was hired to live in and look after Edith, who had become exceedingly frail. Edith tried to hide her disabilities from Gluck.

Mrs Mayer said she was horrified to see E. walking by Pecknell’s. ‘Had no idea she was so bad.’ This was just before E. fell in yard.

Shocking report from A. about seeing E. peering in Alison’s window. Used the word ‘heartbreaking’.

Miss Vye scene at lunch with me re. E.2

The rows lessened, talk of breaking up ended and jealousy abated. Gluck’s preoccupation with Anne Yorke faded, and months passed without reciprocal visits to the Chantry studio or Gatewick. Gluck watched Edith with a mixture of protectiveness, attentiveness and unconcealed impatience. Edith became forgetful and threw away the key to the wine cellar, lost her house keys, and forgot to attend to her financial affairs. Gluck took a sharp view of such absentmindedness. Miss Vye tried to protect Edith:

I tried to shelter Edith from Gluck, but Gluck wanted no one near Edith but